Unsupported drivers

If you have a GeForce 7 series card or older (released in 2006 or earlier), Nvidia no longer supports drivers for your card. This means that these drivers do not support the current Xorg version. It thus might be easier if you use the Nouveau driver, which supports the old cards with the current Xorg.

However, Nvidia's legacy drivers are still available and might provide better 3D performance/stability if you are willing to downgrade Xorg:

Warning: Enabling KMS causes GNOME to default to Wayland, which currently suffers from very poor performance: FS#53284. Use the GNOME on Xorg session instead.

Note: The NVIDIA driver does not provide an fbdev driver for the high-resolution console for the kernel compiled-in vesafb module. However, the kernel compiled-in efifb module supports a high-resolution console on EFI systems. This method requires GRUB and is described in NVIDIA/Tips and tricks#Fixing terminal resolution.[1][2].

Pacman hook

To avoid the possibility of forgetting to update initramfs after an NVIDIA driver upgrade, you may want to use a pacman hook:

Make sure the Target package set in this hook is the one you've installed in steps above (e.g. nvidia, nvidia-dkms, nvidia-lts or nvidia-ck-something).

Note: The complication in the Exec line above is in order to avoid running mkinitcpio multiple times if both nvidia and linux get updated. In case this doesn't bother you, the Target=linux and NeedsTargets lines may be dropped, and the Exec line may be reduced to simply Exec=/usr/bin/mkinitcpio -P.

Hardware accelerated video decoding

NVDEC and VDPAU

Accelerated video decoding with VDPAU is supported on GeForce 8 series cards and newer. Accelerated video decoding with NVDEC is supported on Fermi cards and newer. See hardware video acceleration for details.

XvMC

Configuration

The proprietary NVIDIA graphics card driver does not need any Xorg server configuration file. You can run a test to see if the Xorg server will function correctly without a configuration file. However, it may be required to create a configuration file (prefer /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf over /etc/X11/xorg.conf) in order to adjust various settings. This configuration can be generated by the NVIDIA Xorg configuration tool, or it can be created manually. If created manually, it can be a minimal configuration (in the sense that it will only pass the basic options to the Xorg server), or it can include a number of settings that can bypass Xorg's auto-discovered or pre-configured options.

Save everything after the :: to the end of the attribute (in this case: DPY-1: 2880x1620 @2880x1620 +0+0 {ViewPortIn=2880x1620, ViewPortOut=2880x1620+0+0}) and use to reconfigure your displays with nvidia-settings --assign "CurrentMetaMode=your_meta_mode".

Tip: You can create shell aliases for the different monitor and resolution configurations you use.

ConnectedMonitor

If the driver does not properly detect a second monitor, you can force it to do so with ConnectedMonitor.

The duplicated device with Screen is how you get X to use two monitors on one card without TwinView. Note that nvidia-settings will strip out any ConnectedMonitor options you have added.

TwinView

You want only one big screen instead of two. Set the TwinView argument to 1. This option should be used if you desire compositing. TwinView only works on a per card basis, when all participating monitors are connected to the same card.

If you have multiple cards that are SLI capable, it is possible to run more than one monitor attached to separate cards (for example: two cards in SLI with one monitor attached to each). The "MetaModes" option in conjunction with SLI Mosaic mode enables this. Below is a configuration which works for the aforementioned example and runs GNOME flawlessly.

Manual CLI configuration with xrandr

Reason: Do these commands set up the monitors in TwinView mode? (Discuss in Talk:NVIDIA#)

If the latest solutions do not work for you, you can use your window manager's autostart implementation with xorg-xrandr.

Some xrandr examples could be:

xrandr --output DVI-I-0 --auto --primary --left-of DVI-I-1

or:

xrandr --output DVI-I-1 --pos 1440x0 --mode 1440x900 --rate 75.0

When:

--output is used to indicate the "monitor" to which the options are set.

DVI-I-1 is the name of the second monitor.

--pos is the position of the second monitor relative to the first.

--mode is the resolution of the second monitor.

--rate is the refresh rate (in Hz).

Vertical sync using TwinView

If you are using TwinView and vertical sync (the "Sync to VBlank" option in nvidia-settings), you will notice that only one screen is being properly synced, unless you have two identical monitors. Although nvidia-settings does offer an option to change which screen is being synced (the "Sync to this display device" option), this does not always work. A solution is to add the following environment variables at startup, for example append in /etc/profile:

You can change DFP-0 with your preferred screen (DFP-0 is the DVI port and CRT-0 is the VGA port). You can find the identifier for your display from nvidia-settings in the "X Server XVideoSettings" section.

Gaming using TwinView

In case you want to play fullscreen games when using TwinView, you will notice that games recognize the two screens as being one big screen. While this is technically correct (the virtual X screen really is the size of your screens combined), you probably do not want to play on both screens at the same time.

To correct this behavior for SDL, try:

export SDL_VIDEO_FULLSCREEN_HEAD=1

For OpenGL, add the appropriate Metamodes to your xorg.conf in section Device and restart X:

Mosaic mode

Mosaic mode is the only way to use more than 2 monitors across multiple graphics cards with compositing. Your window manager may or may not recognize the distinction between each monitor. Mosaic mode requires a valid SLI configuration. Even if using Base mode without SLI, the GPUs must still be SLI capable/compatible.

Base Mosaic

Base Mosaic mode works on any set of Geforce 8000 series or higher GPUs. It cannot be enabled from within the nvidia-setting GUI. You must either use the nvidia-xconfig command line program or edit xorg.conf by hand. Metamodes must be specified. The following is an example for four DFPs in a 2x2 configuration, each running at 1920x1024, with two DFPs connected to two cards:

Note: While the documentation lists a 2x2 configuration of monitors, GeForce cards are artificially limited to 3 monitors in Base Mosaic mode. Quadro cards support more than 3 monitors. As of September 2014, the Windows driver has dropped this artificial restriction, but it remains in the Linux driver.

SLI Mosaic

If you have an SLI configuration and each GPU is a Quadro FX 5800, Quadro Fermi or newer then you can use SLI Mosaic mode. It can be enabled from within the nvidia-settings GUI or from the command line with:

Driver persistence

Nvidia has a daemon that can be optionally run at boot. In a standard single-GPU X desktop environment the persistence daemon is not needed and can actually create issues [3]. See the Driver Persistence section of the Nvidia documentation for more details.